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In contrast, a formal garden with crisply pruned hedges and
arp right angles allows him to cram more than a thousand kinds
of plants into his garden without it tumbling into chaos. Plantings
are not allowed to spread out into their natural blowzy shapes, but
instead are disciplined through pruning, pollarding, espaliering, and
twice

Hinfor 10 at his countrya month from June through September,Louis Raymond has an alfresco dinner partyhome in Hopkinton, Rhode Island. The host

is a wit and a showman — he is a former opera singer who has
retained a flair for theatrics — but it is his garden that provides
much of the entertainment. It is, as one visitor put it, “an acre and
a half of ‘Wow!’”

Raymond is legendary in gardening circles and best known
the Boston area for the years he spent as design manager of the

New England Spring Flower Show. He is also the horticultural force
behind landscape design company Renaissance Gardening Ltd., and
many of the dinner guests are current and potential clients. At 6-
foot, 3-inches, Raymond is a tall man and he likes tall plants such
as the woolly morning glory that clambers up a 20-foot tower like
Jack’s bean stalk. Giant 12-foot tree dahlias (Dahlia imperialis) and
soaring hedges pruned vertically tower over guests. “From the terrace you can see groups of heads bobbing just above the scenery,”
says the 55-year-old Raymond with satisfaction.

Though it feels like a remote corner of New England,

opkinton is only a 10-minute drive from the venerable coastal
resort of Westerly, Rhode Island, where Raymond can board Amtrak
and head for his apartment in New York. In Hopkinton’s rural historic district, old village properties like Raymond’s were made narrow
and deep, so that occupants could have their Main Street front porch
and still have plenty of room in back for barns, animals, and crops.
Set behind the classic circa 1785 Greek Revival house that Raymond
shares with his partner, Richard Ericson, a theater producer and
director, his narrow “mini farm” seems like a pyrotechnic secret
garden. The property is a grid of garden beds bisected by a long axis
of lawn and paving. The 400-foot axis is so long, in fact, that when
Raymond calls it his “runway,” one imagines airplanes landing, not
fashion shows. The backyard plantings are so severely geometric
that the garden is easy to spot in satellite photos. “Naturalism is for
wusses,” says Raymond. “People use it as an excuse to plant things
willy-nilly. And naturalism eats up space.”

an
va
other forms of training to grow narrowly up, up, and up. Sections of
the garden are devoted to red, pink, and yellow plants, the yellow
being by far the largest because, well, there are just so many more
yellow plants than red to collect.

The scaffolding is mostly a Tinkertoy-like grid of 10-foot gal-nized metal poles more commonly used for chain-link fences;

Raymond sets them vertically into concrete or fastens them horizontally overhead to provide support for his vines and a framework
for training plants and pruning hedges. They also double as support
posts for the almost invisible 7½-foot-tall black-plastic deer fencing
that surrounds the property.

The landscape hums with the tension of opposites: exuber-ce and restraint, abundance and thrift. Though his plant palette
is huge, Raymond holds that “the plants are never the big expense.
It’s the hardscaping that costs you.” So he cleverly modifies common